Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

GIBSON, WILLIAM• 207

officer, Colonel H. G. (‘‘Tito’’) Medlam; his deputy, Philip Kirby-

Green; theSecret Intelligence Service’s head of station, Colonel

John Codrington; and his subordinate,Donald Darling, looking

after the interests ofMI9. In addition, early in the warSpecial Oper-

ations Executiveposted an H Section mission on the Rock, headed

byPeter Kemp, which was withdrawn when the danger of a German

occupation of southern Spain diminished.

After the war, the Strait of Gibraltar continued to have a strategic

significance as a choke point for the Mediterranean and the terminal

for aSOSUSunderwater array stretching into the Atlantic.

GIBSON, WILLIAM.Born in Canada, William Gibson was with his
parents in St. Petersburg when World War I was declared in August

1914. Upon hearing the news, he went to the British embassy to de-
      mand a commission and, having been turned away by the military
      attache ́, volunteered for the Russian army as a motorcycle dispatch
      rider. Gibson fought in Poland and on the Russian-Bulgarian border
      until the end of 1915, when he took his German fiance ́e to London.
      There, in March 1916, he visited the War Office and offered his ser-
      vices.

Eventually I was received in one of the offices with great courtesy by an

impressive-looking Intelligence colonel, who informed me after a little

conversation that I was exactly the man who was wanted, and that all I had

to do was to go back to my hotel and await instructions. Full of joy, I did

as he requested—and I was still sitting in my hotel five weeks later.

Instead of working for the War Office, Gibson accepted a job with a

small trading company and was told to return to Petrograd and have

the ‘‘office in running order by the time my chief, C——, arrived on

the scene.’’ Gibson, accompanied by his wife, arrived in Petrograd in

March and his ‘‘reputation of ‘mystery man’ grew by leaps and

bounds, as we learned later. As a matter of fact, I was, unknown to

myself, about to become a real mystery man.’’ The cause of the mys-

tery was Colonel Sergei Rudniev’s offer to Gibson to join the Rus-

sian Secret Service, a proposition that the young man accepted. Thus

Gibson embarked upon a mission to Tashkent in Central Asia as a

Secret Intelligence Serviceagent and as ‘‘spy upon spies number

41’’ for Colonel Rudniev.